


Cursory Examination

by iiii



Series: Incidents in Transit [7]
Category: Firefly, Supernatural
Genre: Exposition, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 14:40:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1608788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiii/pseuds/iiii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Everything’s fine and then all the sudden out of nowhere it’s <em>Alien</em>, but with werewolves.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Next morning, after reveille, tai chi, and breakfast, everyone wanted to watch the scans done. Simon said there wasn’t enough room in the infirmary for everyone at once. Dean muttered something about being creeped out by people staring. Mal reminded the company that they had work to do, and told them to do it elsewhere. Except Jayne, who Mal set to cleaning weapons in the lounge again. And Victor, who successfully argued that those were his scans they were making, and he should be witness to the making of them.

Dean went under the scanner first. Simon checked the first scan, recalibrated the apparatus, and ran it again. The results didn’t change. Mal proposed a more thorough diagnostic on the machinery. Dean stood up, put his shirts back on, and, over Mal and Simon’s protests, walked out.

Those left in the infirmary heard a murmur of conversation from the lounge area, and then Jayne’s voice raised in loving recitation of Vera’s specifications and maintenance requirements.

“He’s not real patient when he hasn’t had his coffee,” Sam said, and stripped off his own shirts.

"Shouldn't there be a scar in the middle of your back?" Victor asked.

"That went a few resurrections ago."

"Right."

*****

Simon turned a dial. “Oh.”

“Not what you were expecting, Doc?”

“That was supposed to heighten the contrast enough to show the edges of the cermet overlay. But instead the marks are fluorescing blue. What fluoresces blue at that wavelength?”

“You’re asking me?”

“No, I was… never mind.”

 

In the lounge, Jayne was telling Dean about the time Vera killed a space station.

*****

When Simon said he wanted to reset the scanner's controls a third time, Sam pointed out that the deal was for scans, not an explanation of those scans acceptable to medical science and hyperskepticism, so he’d like his reading material now, please.

Victor produced a pair of tablets and gave the Winchesters the short course on how to use them. Dean said he was taking the history book and retreated to his room. Sam thanked Victor and took the Gospels off to his own room.

Victor sighed that they hadn't done rock-paper-scissors. Then he interrupted Mal and Simon, who were brainstorming mundane means of carving symbols into living bone, long enough to collect copies of the scans, and went forward to show his prizes to his mother.

*****

Twenty minutes later Sam stalked into Dean’s room and shoved his tablet in Dean’s face.

“What’s this?”

“The Bible. A new translation, with all the verses about the ‘Righteous Man’ and the ‘Wayward Son’ highlighted in green, see? Turns out the Book of Proverbs is all about how you rule and I drool. Oh, and it’s now a multimedia presentation.” Sam tapped the screen and the room was full of Kansas, harmonizing _a cappella_. “I’m taking the histories.”

“Sammy…”

Sam took the tablet Dean had been using and shut the door behind him.

Dean turned the music off and read the screen in front of him, Proverbs 15. It was a paean to the Righteous Man’s virtuous obedience to paternal authority, intercut with a scathing condemnation of the Wayward Son for… what, exactly? Standing up for himself? Getting tired of only ever having herbs for dinner? Damn. Yeah, Sam could have the histories.

Dean flipped back to the start page and took it from the top.

*****

Three hours later, Dean stuck his head into Sam’s room.

“How’s the _History of the World, Part 2_?”

“Oh, hey. It’s five hundred years of colonizing. Planet settled, another planet settled, another planet settled, trade routes established, lather, rinse, repeat. I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens. How’s the Bible?”

“How far did you get, exactly?”

“Read the table of contents, flipped through the Old Testament enough to spot the green letter thing. Then I dumped it on you.”

“Yeah, so, like you said, new translation. You saw how they re-wrote Proverbs. They gave the New Testament a working over, too. I kind of skimmed that part.” Actually, Dean had been too revolted by the lengths they’d gone to manufacture parallels between the Prince of Peace and a violent alcoholic to keep reading. “I’ll go through it more careful tonight.”

“Thanks, man. I just…”

“Yeah, dude, I got it. Next they got Chuck’s crap. They kept all of that the same. Far as I can tell, anyway.” After Becky Rosen’s revelation about the whereabouts of the Colt, Sam and Dean had made a point of reading Chuck’s work, including the unpublished manuscripts. They’d been grasping at every straw and turning over every rock; the prospect of finding useful information had made reading the Supernatural books seem worth the time. All they’d found out was that Chuck was a drunken weasel who wrote like a drunken weasel, which they had already known, and that they should verify the contents of voicemails in person, which they hadn’t. “It’s all multimedia now, too. He mentions a song, it starts playing. We quote a movie, the scene starts up in a little box in a corner. It’s distracting as hell.”

“Sounds like an improvement.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah, kinda. The next part, the ‘Books of Transit,’ that's where it gets interesting. They're ships’ logs from when they were moving everybody from Earth to out here. Standard colony ship had ten or twenty thousand people in stasis, a cargo hold full of their junk, and fifty-some people awake to run things, make sure they didn’t fall into a star or something. That’s what she was talking about last night, colony ships where weird shit happened. Our kind of weird. The _Brundtland_ , everything’s fine and then all the sudden out of nowhere it’s _Alien_ , but with werewolves. They sent out distress calls about dogs killing the crew – video and everything – and then transmission cuts off. Ship's never heard from again. The _Shinawatra_ , pretty much the same thing. _Alien_ , but with vampires. Except this time, one of the astrogators was a ‘Fangirl’" - Dean put air-quotes around that - "and recognized the teeth. She made herself a machete and went Ripley on their ass. Then she put together the video and the last transmissions from the _Brundtland_ and talked her captain into broadcasting it all ship-to-ship, along with the complete works of Carver Edlund. People on the other ships thought they were nuts, but they read the books anyway ‘cause they were just that bored. Then the crew of the _Han_ realized that they had a ghoul munching on the civilians in stasis. They put it out the airlock, and then _they_ broadcast pictures. A couple dozen ships total had monster problems and lived to tell about it. Another dozen or so, they figure from the distress calls it was freaks, but the ships didn’t make it. One of those, they say it was ‘unidentified supernatural creatures,’ but it read to me like they were hijacked by angels.”

“Seriously?”

“Read it yourself. Log of the _das Neves_.”

“Huh.”

“There were also some just plain mutinies, no monsters, just people. A few dozen more ships went missing and they got reason to think it was mechanical failure or getting hit by a rock. Some just stopped transmitting for no reason anyone knows. These Fangirls are real careful about not calling anything supernatural unless they’ve got good reason.”

“Like pictures of vampires.”

“Like pictures of vampires. And that’s about as far as I got when I decided it was time for lunch.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Your respect for the opinions of duly constituted authority should be the basis for a thousand songs.”

Lunch quickly deteriorated into a fight.

“But there’s _videotape_ ,” Dean said.

“It was faked,” replied Mal.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Werewolves are fake.”

“And that’s not circular, not a jot,” Jamie said.

“You’re asking me to credit –“

“No one’s asking you to credit anything, Horatio,” Jamie said. “We’re asking you not to reject the evidence of your own wits because you don’t like their witness.”

“You’re talking about _werewolves_. You can’t fault anyone for being skeptical.” Simon said.

Jamie threw up her hands. “But he’s not being skeptical! You’re not being skeptical! Your notions are fixed rigid and any other ideas must be fanciful. That’s not skepticism. That’s adherence to a conflicting faith.”

“OK, I don’t think we’re going to settle that one right now,” Sam said. “But I’m wondering, when they got out here, why the crews didn’t tell everyone to be on the lookout for monsters.”

“They did,” Jamie said. “At first, anyway. But then no obvious monsters came slavering from the holds of the landed ships. Closest thing were some weird rotted remains that got written off as stasis mishaps.”

“Stasis decomp can work fearsome transmogrification on a body,” Jayne said. 

Jamie nodded. “It truly can. And then nothing happened that couldn’t be explained away, not for years. There were incidents and accidents, of course, but they were actively terraforming every chunk of rock in the Core. Incidents and accidents happen. The folks in charge finally declared that the stories from Transit were all cabin fever. They said what happened to the _Brundtland_ was some kind of mutiny by dog-lovers and the crew of the _Shinawatra_ had amused themselves making a scary movie. Everything after was either a rascal trying to outshine the _Shinawatra’s_ lark or a dupe fooled by the rascals.”

“And so it was,” Mal said.

“Your respect for the opinions of duly constituted authority should be the basis for a thousand songs.”

*****

It was getting on to dinner time when Sam reappeared in Dean’s room.  “I found something interesting.”

“Me too.  'The Walking Encyclopedia of Weirdness.'  They got everything in here.”  Holy books, origin stories, sagas, and lore from every corner of Earth, all presented in their respective original languages, as well as English and Chinese.  “It’s awesome, man.  How to hunt anything I’ve ever heard of and some I haven’t, with, like, twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining how to gank it.  It’s all cross-referenced and notated and shit.”  Dean trailed off, lost for words to describe the glories of a complete hunting reference in plain language with accurate illustrations and an index.

“Sounds awesome.”

“Dude, it is.  That place she said yesterday, Newhall?  The Encyclopedia says it was a ‘thieving bear planet.’  The first colony all died of starvation, so their ghosts weren’t so much angry as _hungry_.  They ate through the next set of colonists a few molecules at a time ‘til there was nothing left.  Then they did it again to the next set.  Kept happening until some Hunter type had the bright idea of landing a couple of Orthodox priests on Easter Sunday to recite the Invocation of Holy Fire, like they do at the Holy Sepulcher, you know?”

Sam nodded.

“Fire knocked out all the ghosts at once.  They say it was a hell of a light show.  After that, the colony there did fine.” 

Sam looked impressed. 

“So what’d you find?”

“Seems that about fifteen years back, the Union of Allied Planets decided to invade all the independent worlds.  Alliance wins.  Everyone’s under one government.  Then after the war, settlements out on the edges start getting attacked by something they called ‘Reavers.’”

“Wait, let me check the Encyclopedia…got it.  Reavers.  Uhm… Wow.  That is some serious carnage.  And…says they’re not monsters?”  Dean looked up at Sam quizzically.

“History book says they’re just people who had a bad reaction to a psychoactive chemical code-named ‘Pax’.  The government released it world-wide on a planet called Miranda just before the war.  Most people there just laid down and died.  A few got hyper-violent and went off terrorizing nearby planets.”

“People,” Dean said, with a shake of his head.

“Yeah.  But get this.  The Alliance government was covering up the whole thing, denying the existence of Reavers.  Until eight years ago, when Simon Tam rescued his sister River from the government facility where she was being held.”

“Wait.  We just had lunch with…?”

“That’s them.  They end up on the good ship Serenity,” Sam waved an encompassing hand, “captained by one Malcolm Reynolds, who we also just had lunch with.  River knew what happened on Miranda – the book’s a little vague as to how – and Reynolds and his crew go to Miranda, get convincing evidence, and broadcast it all over the place.”

“Huh.”

“Uh-huh.  So there’s a regime change down at Alliance HQ and a bunch of people go to jail.  New bosses went in and cleaned up the Reaver problem.”

“What about the people we just had lunch with?  It doesn’t look like they're collecting pensions from a grateful nation.”

“Yeah, they're not.  Official line is that Reynolds and his crew were heroically civic-minded in the matter of Miranda, but that doesn’t change how all of them have outstanding warrants for smuggling, fraud, assault, and tax evasion.”

“So what you're saying, basically, is that they’re our kind of people?”

“Yep.”

Dean smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Thieving Bear Planet" is a short story by R.A. Lafferty.


End file.
